By Ben Clark
I read an article the other week which stated that enterprise architecture problems would be solved at a stroke if there were complete clarity on the roles and responsibilities of an architecture function within a company. Okay, I am exaggerating here, but the man had a point, and the industry itself does not help its cause with variation upon variation of architecture job titles. As of July 2026, there are over 600 architecture roles on LinkedIn; 350 different titles and 200 different words are used. Whenever I mention this to a Chief Architect, the response I get every time is a rueful smile, a shake of the head and “I am not surprised.”
It is a problem that does not look like ever being resolved, though from a selfish perspective, as one of the few people in architecture recruitment who can pick their way through this mess, it helps me more than it harms me when speaking to clients.
I saw a job the other week that made me put my head in my hands. The job title tells all: “Global Business Architect for Data and Security.” Hopefully, if you are reading this, you had the same face-palming reaction as me. Some of the highlights of this job ad include the following:
Can someone please tell me why this supposedly business architect requires a deep technical background and knowledge of blockchain? No, me neither.
I have never come across, nor do I think I ever will come across, this skill set in one person. There is no such thing as a Business, Data and Security Architect; they are three very distinct jobs. There is a degree of crossover at a strategic level between business and data, and between security and data, but at very different places in a Venn diagram. Do our stakeholders really need architecture sending out mixed messages like this? If you see your company doing this, say no; it is not realistic, and we should not advertise the job this way. The ad above is certainly not an exception, and I have seen very similar examples in job ads and CVs over the last 25 years. Twenty-one people applied for this role.
Anyone who knows Konvergent will know we built our reputation through an outstanding associate network. When anyone joins the recruitment team, I tell them I do not expect them to understand the architecture world for at least 12 months. There are around 50 to 70 different types of architecture role, but architects use the same job title to describe what turn out to be very different roles. If that does not confuse you, nothing will! To categorise an architect, you must first ignore the job title, understand what they do, and then map that back to our categories. Simple, it is not!
There will always be some standardisation in architecture, as there is for accountancy or veterinary medicine, even without a regulatory body. However, the industry needs to rethink how it titles jobs. Write the job spec and title it to match; your roles and responsibilities should always dictate your job title, not the other way round.
Is this something you recognise? Who uses the SFIA framework when creating job specs? What can be done? If a regulatory body is not the answer, what is?
